I saw the movie today and thought I would start a thread since I didn’t see that there was one. There will be spoilers beyond the jump.

I liked this movie a lot more than the first one, mainly because it felt like an apology for the first one to fans of the cartoon.

This movie has Bebop and Rocksteady, played by Gary Anthony Williams and the WWE wrestler Sheamus. Gary is probably best known for voicing Uncel Ruckus on The Boondocks and Sheamus....well he’s best known for a Kiss Me Arse match at last year’s Extreme Rules and being part of the group of jobers known as The League Of Nations. He was also WWE Champion for a while but we’re going to pretend that was a fever dream. They do a pretty decent job, and have good chemistry. I thought they were funnier when they were human since once they become mutants it feels like the humor becomes more juvenile. Still they seem to be having a good time. My only issue is that their arc is more centered around Stephen Amell’s Casey Jones, who they beat up while escaping a prison transport they share with the Shredder.

Speaking of Jones, Amell does an ok job here but his presence is pretty forgettable. He only dons his iconic goalie mask and hockey stick look once in the movie saving April from some Foot Clan thugs.

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Shredder is back and he has help in Tyler Perry’s Baxter Stockman, playing the role like he’s channeling Neil DeGrass Tyson.

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He’s OK but I wish if they were going to have Stockman in the movie they had Mousers. Perhaps that’s being saved for movie three. What’s funny is that most people know Stockman from the 80s cartoon as a white guy but he was actually African American in the Mirage comic.

April was also his assistant, a software engineer who developed the Mouser software.

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I was going to discuss the entire plot but it was getting boring so here are a few observations.

Vern made a deal with the Turtles to take credit for taking down Shredder so they wouldn’t be investigated. Here in the final battle from the first movie. Now we’re expected to believe that Vern beat this guy, ignoring that NYC has a camera of some kind pointed at pretty much every part of the city at any given time?

The overall plot was pretty basic. Shredder gets sucked through a portal while Baxter tries to free him from the prison transport using an alien artifact he had because the plot required him to. He meets Krang and they agree to work together to make a portal large enough to bring in the Technodrom to, what else, take over the world.

Either take over the world or destroy it, Krang’s movitivation is never 100% clear

Krang actually looks pretty good in this version.

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He’s more vicious and devious than the goofy Krang we’re used to from the cartoon but he has to be in order to be a credible villain. He has no issues backstabbing his allies like he did to Shredder. That said, you don’t put Shredder in armor this badass.....

and not let him do anything with it.

I wish Bebop and Rocksteady had fought the Turtles again after they beat them in Brazil. The boys never get a chance to get payback. The entire arc with those two was with Amell’s Casey Jones.

I like Amell but I hate this version of the character. I much prefered the vigilante Casey from the cartoon and older movies. I also wish he had used more sports items like a bat or golf club.

Also, how once again does there exist no footage of the Turtle garbage truck Amell told his boss about? Even if there was no security camera footage on the highway surely some driver at some point had to pull over and take video on their phone and post it to social media. This is not 2004 where you might buy no one snapping a million photographs of unmasked SpiderMan from Spiderman 2.

The movie ended in what was obviously a setup for a third movie. The boys manage to force the Technodrome back but with Shredder put in some kind of cryo-freeze and Krang still alive. Baxter is taken by Foot Clan to their Tokyo base.

However the numbers are pretty bad so far. The odds of a third movie don’t look great.

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I’ll just end this by saying that if there isn’t a third movie it will be a shame because this movie was much better than the first. The plot may have been paint by numbers but at least it made sense and had characters I knew and cared about, unlike the 2014 movie with Shredder and Science Guy Villian What’s His Name. Also no Messiah April. Actually very little April and thankfully less of charisma vacuum and professional jackass Will Arnett’s Vern. I actually liked Bebop and Rocksteady and want to see them fight the Turtles in a straight up fight, not a gimmicky river sequence. Over all I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would